Raphaela Vogel

Vogel´s various artistic practices glue together media that at first sight appear to be opposed: objects, sculptures, collages, paintings, videos and music. She calls up dream-like landscapes that tell anything but a clear, linear story. With much humour and lightness, her sculptures pose questions about grand ideologies such as imperialism or colonialism. In a time where public sculptures are being intensely discussed around the world, Vogel clears the way for what she calls ´medium-sized narratives´. It is the answer to two discourses: the oft-criticised grand narratives that you see depicted in monuments, and the micropolitics which proceed on the assumption that you can change the world by starting with yourself. As a compromise between the two discourses she places the medium-sized narratives: the ideal successors for the dusty, outmoded ideologies that today are long past their sell-by date.

Vogel plays with the ancient motif in art history where two animals must offer protection to an element that they surround symmetrically and so must ward off evil. For Beaufort Vogel chose two giraffes. They try to make themselves look bigger by standing on ordinary refrigerators and using them as a pedestal. With their unthreatening character and their slogan that calls for acknowledging medium-sized narratives, they introduce a new type of monument, without glorification, better suited to the present age.

The giraffes appear to refer to Testerep, the island that lay off the coast and from which Ostend (“East-end”) derives its name. As of the fifteenth century the tongue of land was inundated and submerged by the North Sea. Today washed-up fossils still attest to the former human and animal activity. Whether giraffes actually foraged on Testerep is (still) unknown. Vogel leaves that question entirely to the viewer´s rich imagination.